ScienceCard is a new service that I started last month with the simple idea to automatically track all journal articles of a given author, and to collect the article-level metrics (citations, bookmarks, etc.) for these papers. ScienceCard requires unique identifiers for articles and authors to work. Unique identifiers for authors is a difficult topic regularly discussed in this blog.
Metrics for scholarly works are used for evaluation and discovery. The Journal Impact Factor is widely used, but is not the best tool to look at the metrics of an individual article. In the past few years we finally started to have the technology to do article-level metrics (citations, downloads, etc.) and PLoS has pushed this concept since at least 2009.
The Science Online London 2011 Conference was a great event that took place last Friday and Saturday. I was able to celebrate the first PLoS Blogs anniversary together with community manager Brian Mossop , but a detailed conference post will follow later. The blog posts covering the event are here, and the list is growing by the hour.
At the Science Online London Conference later this week I will moderate a session on microattribution , together with Mike Peel, Bora Zivkovic and Scott Edmunds. I thought that microattribution would be an established concept, so I was surprised to find so little information about it. Wikipedia doesn’t know about microattribution.
The first beta of the reference manager Zotero 3.0 was released yesterday. The big news is that Zotero 3.0 no longer only runs within the Firefox browser, but is now also available as a standalone version similar to other reference managers. Zotero Connectors integrate with the Chrome and Safari browser. They also allow saving directly to your Zotero library at zotero.org. Zotero does not support Internet Explorer.
Yesterday I discovered (via a tweet by Owen Stephens) a very interesting document Personal names around the world that discusses the following question: The document was written by Richard Ishida, Internationalization Activity Lead at the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). The document was published on July 26, and Richard was seeking comments until August 7 before finalizing the document.
In July Wiley published the book Visualize This – The Flowing Data Guide to Design, Visualization and Statistics . The book is written by Nathan Yau , and he is of course also behind the popular FlowingData blog about the same topic. This is a short review of the book. Please keep in mind that I’m no expert in data visualization.
Last week Google Scholar announced a new feature on the Google Scholar Blog: Google Scholar Citations . The stated purpose of this tool is to allow researchers to calculate their citation metrics, e.g. their Hirsch index (H-index). This is an interesting new service, that not only helps with calculating citation metrics, but also shows you who is citing your papers – a great discovery tool.
Version 1.0 of the reference manager Mendeley was released today. In good Web 2.0 tradition it took three years from the first Beta release to the first “finished” product. I interviewed co-founder Victor Henning back in September 2008, and both the software and the company have gone a long way since then. Congratulations. Mendeley has changed reference management in many ways.
Other blog posts often provide important background material for your own posts, and they are typically cited by inline links in the text. But sometimes we need more formal citations, e.g. when citing blog posts in a journal article or when providing a bibliography. But how do you properly cite a blog post?
Brendan Thomas has published an interesting paper that looks at author email addresses in the PubMed database of biomedical literature. Email addresses of first authors have been added to PubMed since 1996, and they can be retrieved via the standard web interface or automated software. This makes PubMed an excellent place to find the email address of an academic author, but also shows that PubMed is very vulnerable to email address harvesting.
